Cultural Policy Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Broadly defined, cultural policy deals with institutional support and guidance for ways of life or culture as understood in anthropology. Such support can include the diffusion of governance to make possible the cultivation of specific tastes and habits, through educational and other means. Examples of cultural policy include the support of particular languages and other symbols of nationhood to foster patriotism and nationalism. Cultural policy can be viewed in the narrow sense of institutional support for creative and aesthetic human expression, yet all cultural expressions, narrow or broad, are important for cultural identities and often emerge at the forefront of political debates.

Cultural policy studies in general are interdisciplinary and broad in focus, though public policy literatures in political science attending to cultural policy tend to confine their understanding to institutional support for creative and aesthetic human expression. These include fine and performing arts and creative or entertainment industry products such as films, music, and publishing. Beyond these core aesthetic expressions, cultural policy can often relate to cultural tourism exploring the tangible and intangible heritage of societies and design elements of industries, such as advertising, architecture, and textiles.

From Patronage To Subsidies

Historically, support for cultural expressions depended on patronage from royalty, religious institutions, or the wealthy elite. In ancient India, the fine and performing arts flourished in and around temples; Indian classical dance and music, for example, had religious significance. The Florentine Renaissance, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, was spur red by the impetus given to the arts by the house of Medici. The modern era broadened the categories of the wealthy, in turn expanding patronage and thus encouraging new forms of art. The English bourgeoisie, which arose from the early Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, gave a boost to English romantic painting through an emerging trend of private art collecting that spurred the romantic painters with a market for their works. Meanwhile, absolutist monarchies such as the Bourbons in France or the Hapsburgs in Austria preferred grand symbols of patronage, such as magnificent opera houses designed for imperial or national glorification.

After World War II (1939–1945), governments played an active role in cultural policy by giving various kinds of direct and indirect support to the arts and thus encouraging the growth of artists as a professional class. Historically, most artists had worked part-time, bringing about the popular image of the starving artist. Direct support for the arts came from government subsidies and grants and support for institutions such as museums, performing arts centers, and arts festivals and fairs. Indirect support for the arts came from tax, philanthropic incentives, and restrictions on creative industry products from other countries, ostensibly to encourage national ones.

Cultural Policy In The United States

The United States, in particular, has encouraged tax and philanthropy incentives to encourage arts financing. While the total budget of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the United States was only $132 million in 2006, charitable giving to the arts was $12.51 billion. The NEA budget was itself supplemented by other federal appropriations for arts institutions such as the Smithsonian ($517 million), Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB; $416 million), and the Kennedy Center ($18 million).

The United States does not have an official cultural policy because support for the arts comes from agencies such as the NEA, and the government keeps itself at arm’s length from issues of culture that are supposedly left for the citizens and private industry. In practice, the U.S. government does intervene in arts controversies, such as the reining in of the NEA or CPB when they were deemed too far to the left in the 1980s or, on the other hand, the quite visible impetus given to U.S. cultural products in public diplomacy initiatives. Despite these interventions, it is generally believed that independent arts agencies such as the NEA, or its role model, the UK’s Arts Council, tend to keep direct political interference more to a minimum than when the support comes from ministries of culture. Nevertheless, public choice theorists often note that bureaucrats in arts agencies have an incentive to follow conservative policies in the arts so as to avoid highly charged controversies, especially around images of national heritage.

International Ministries Of Culture

Most countries in the world boast of ministries of culture even though, as in the United Kingdom, they might have independent funding agencies for the arts. Thus, the ministry of culture in France has been historically important not only for inculcating a sense of French identity but also for supervising important funding organizations such as Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), a crucial pillar in the support of French cinema. Public support for the arts is difficult to calculate because of the myriad instruments and institutions involved, and thus comparative estimates are difficult. It is estimated that France and Austria have some of the highest yearly arts expenditure per capita at €180 and €179, respectively.

Ministries of culture are also gaining importance in the developing world after years of neglect in the postcolonial era, due to lack of resources or relegation of culture to recessive tradition, as opposed to the impetus given to modernization through industrialization. Countries like China and India have now prioritized creative industries in their economic development while cities that thrive on arts and creativity and derive their identity from it are coming up all over the world. Centers of music production are flourishing in places such as Bamako, Mali, and Bogotá, Colombia, while film production takes off in Mexico, South Africa, and India. The spectacular opening ceremonies at the XXIX Olympiad in Beijing directed by film director Zhang Yimou, choreographer Zhang Jigang, and composer Tan Dun presented a culturally confident China to an estimated global television audience of between two and four billion people.

At the international level, many countries feel threatened by foreign, especially U.S. or Hollywood, creative industry exports. The Uruguay Round of trade talks (1986–1994) at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) galvanized the debates on cultural exports. The European Union (EU), especially with French backing, vigorously contested the market liberalization that would ensue from GATT’s measures, fearing that Hollywood would further dominate their cultural markets and weaken the influence of domestic cultural products and policies. The EU, therefore, did not make any commitments in the audiovisual negotiations, the so-called cultural exception. The phrase was often used in European context to note that the importance of creative products to cultural identity was such that they needed a special exception to global norms governing international trade. The fear of future liberalization goaded Canada and Francophone countries led by France to assemble an international coalition of cultural ministries and civil society organizations to act concertedly to frame the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Convention on the Protection and Promotion on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, which came in to force in March 2007. The purpose of this convention is to recognize the importance of cultural industries to national and societal cultural identities and diversity of cultural expressions. More importantly, the convention seeks to promote national autonomy in cultural policy and exempt it from global market norms. Nevertheless, UNESCO itself lacks effective enforcement powers and thus the future impact of the convention remains unclear.

Conclusion

Cultural policy is intricately tied with cultural identity and politicians, and cultural industry elite often exploit this link to their advantage in trying to restrict or ban particular cultural expressions or flows of cultural products. For example, the EU’s Television Without Frontiers directive that went into effect in 1992 has tried to reserve a majority of the television broadcast content in its twenty-seven member states to national or EU programming for the explicit purpose of promoting European cultural identities. Nevertheless, cultural products and flows continue to grow globally. Cultural identities, as a result, continue to assimilate many influences—as they always have.

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